


disappear in the trees

by loveandthetruth



Category: Uncharted
Genre: F/M, Identity Issues, mild PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-15
Updated: 2014-12-15
Packaged: 2018-03-01 14:58:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2777375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveandthetruth/pseuds/loveandthetruth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not that he doesn't love her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	disappear in the trees

They get married in London, breathless with adrenaline. They exchange rings stolen from an auction of antiques and heirlooms yesterday while Charlie and Sully stand witness for them and Elena laughs against his mouth. All of them are visibly bruised, Charlie has a bandage wrapped around his palm, and pleasantly buzzed from a little too much champagne.

Later, he locks himself in the bathroom for hours while guilt and fear make him heave and his head spins with all the reasons this is possibly, probably, the worst idea he’s ever had.

 -

Nate’s spent most of his life on the kind of adventures that start with ideas of money and glory and usually lead to getting shot at. Occasionally it means being the one doing the shooting. He’s learnt to cope with the sleepless nights and the way his hand sometimes aches from the weight of a gun he isn’t holding and he survives by not thinking too hard about what kind of man he is.

 -

It’s not that he doesn’t love her, he does, and it’s not that he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life with her, he does, it’s just that he doesn’t know how to tell her that the man she married is someone he made up when he was a child too afraid to be nothing. As time wears on he begins to find the lulls between jobs unbearable, the quiet moments throwing light on the fact that he really doesn’t know who he is outside of this persona he created for himself.

He’s never really needed to be more than that, and he’s never wanted to before.

 -

Lately the sleepless nights are becoming less about his own mistakes and regrets and more about the woman lying next to him. His fingers trace absently over shrapnel scars and he sees Elena buried under rubble, Elena swept away with the tide. Elena with bullet wounds, Elena with broken bones. Elena never waking up, never coming back.

 -

The drag of adventure is almost constant under his skin and he always gives in to it because if he’s spending all his time scrambling across the world, courting disaster, the less time he has to think about the disasters of his own making, but Elena has crept under his skin too and when he’s with her he itches to be away and when he’s away he itches to be home and he just doesn’t understand how one person can fuck up this badly.

 -

He pawns his wedding ring. It’s not as bad as it sounds really; he just needs a little more cash to get him the rest of the way to his goal and he doesn’t think much of it, even as Sully murmurs disapprovingly behind him, because he’s going to get it back after all. It’s no big deal.

Except of course it takes him three weeks to get back with his treasure, instead of the agreed upon ten days, and of course his ring is long gone, and Nate could laugh if he wasn’t so busy hating himself.

 -

He’s been home a week and he’s ready to peel out of his skin. He’s been taking cat naps and drinking too much coffee and when he can’t take it anymore he just leaves, catches the first flight he can get and ends up on Sully’s doorstep where he blurts out _I’m going after Marlowe_. Sully sighs and says _you break my heart, kid_ and Nate trembles in the doorway, caught between the person he wants to be and the person he can’t let go of.

 -

They both spend the next four months with one foot out of the door.

Sometimes he catches her looking at him with something in her eyes that he can’t name, and he wants to shake her and remind her that _this isn’t worth dying over_. It wasn’t then, and it isn’t now and here they are, later, and they’re still arguing about it even when they aren’t saying a fucking word.

 -

When she gets the foreign correspondent job, they don’t talk about it because they both know that he isn’t staying here either and one kind of stupid is mostly the same as any other so what does she have left to say to him that she’s hasn’t already said in one form or other anyway.

They don’t talk about the house they bought together and the things in it and the hopes they might have had. They don’t talk about divorce but they both know that this is the end.

It’s funny how the only things he ever really gives up on are the ones that matter the most.

 -

The fights don’t start till later. Awkward calls filled with empty spaces evolve into passive aggressive conversations and frustrated mid-sentence hang ups, evolve into sharp unkind truths.

Elena says _I love you_ and Nate says _we were fooling ourselves, we weren’t ready for this_. Nate says _I love you_ and Elena says _even when you were here you were always gone_. They say _please_ , they say _I’m sorry_ , and then there’s only silence.

 -

He lets himself forget, filling his time and his head with plans for recovering the decoder and solving Drake’s last mystery that only he seems to care about, and after it all seeing her waiting for them in Yemen makes his breath stop in his throat and his heart stutter in his chest like nothing has changed, like they haven’t wasted all this time going in opposite directions.

They smile at each other and he can’t help but wonder that if he can close this chapter, cut the strings that have been holding him back from her, maybe they’re not out of second chances. Maybe this time he can make it right.

**Author's Note:**

> Nathan is a disaster covered up with roguish charm and heavy sarcasm.
> 
> Title from [Run Boy Run](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmc21V-zBq0)


End file.
